Technical Field
This disclosure relates to electronic circuits. More specifically, this disclosure relates to a sub-terahertz (THz)/THz interconnect.
Related Art
Semiconductor technology advancements generate two side effects. On the one hand, the advancements speed up data processing and reduce energy consumption per bit. On the other hand, these advancements keep increasing transmission data rate requirements and keep increasing the gap from interconnect capabilities. Some experts envision that the energy used for data communication is orders of magnitude higher than the energy used for data processing and storage (see e.g., E. Yablonovitch, SRC Workshop, Asheville, 2005). Therefore, in the near future, majority of the energy is expected to be consumed by data communication.
Intra-/inter- chip interconnects impose a wide range of stringent performance requirements: energy efficiency, bandwidth density, reliability, cost, etc. To meet these requirements, small size, low loss and low cost interconnect channels are crucial. Sub-THz/THz interconnect channels, due to small sizes, have been investigated based on a variety of materials and structures, with demonstrated losses of <1 dB/m. These low loss sub-THz/THz channels can potentially alleviate link budgets to boost interconnect efficiency. For example, see (1) J. W. Lamb, and W. A. Davis, “Miscellaneous data on materials for millimetre and submillimetre optics”, International Journal of Infrared and Millimeter Waves, 17(12), 1997, (2) C. Yeh, F. Shimabukuro, and P. H. Siegel, “Low-loss terahertz ribbon waveguides”, Appl. Opt., vol. 44, no. 28, October 2005, (3) B. Ung, A. Mazhorova, M. Roze, A. Dupuis, and M. Skorobogatiy, “Plastic fibers for terahertz wave guiding”, ECOC Technical Digest, OSA, 2011, and (4) K. Wang, and D. M. Mittleman, “Metal wires for terahertz wave guiding”, Nature, vol. 432, pp 376-379, November 2004.